Page 35 of Rio (Redcars #3)

TWENTY-FIVE

Lyric

“Cave team, we’re live,” Jamie’s voice crackled in my ear. “We’ve got visual. Audio. Recording now.”

I glanced left, then right—just enough to give Caleb and Jamie an idea of our position and immediate threat level.

I needed to find a terminal, a hardline, anything.

Some access point to the system. Even partial access might be enough for Jamie to force a backdoor or trigger a response.

But every second wasted was one we couldn’t get back.

“He’s locked himself in,” Caleb advised. “No exterior access to the mark.”

“Rio, three o’clock,” Jamie added, and I slumped as Rio headed that way under the pretense of having his back to the wall.

“I want my money,” Rio barked, his voice harsh and cutting through the tension. He yanked me back against him. I stumbled on purpose, making it seem real, trusting him not to let me hit the floor.

He didn’t. His arm clamped around my chest, the barrel of the gun jamming against my temple. Cold. Heavy.

I whimpered—sharp, panicked—and not for a single breath did Rio flinch. He played the part as if he were born for it, dragging me across the room with a force that appeared brutal even though I felt how carefully he handled me.

Then he shoved me against the wall, face-first, my cheek scraping the cold surface as he pressed in behind me as if I was nothing more than leverage.

I was close enough to reach under the console, covering it up by fighting back against Rio, and as I wriggled and pretended to free myself, I slipped Jamie’s tag that would spoof system trust signals, and pressed it against a sensor beneath the console lip.

My fingers didn’t shake. A soft chirp confirmed the connection.

Caleb let out a soft whoop. “We’ve got a lane.”

A moment of silence, then Jamie’s breath hitched. “We see it. We’re in.”

Just enough to make this whole thing possible.

I could only hope that the embedded tag would trigger the handshake protocol—open a link and fool LyricNight into recognizing a trusted command source.

It had to be enough for Jamie and Caleb to punch their way in from the outside, using the signal I’d masked into the tag’s code.

If it didn’t work? Then Rio and I were screwed.

Worse, the AI would know we were here—and what we were trying to do.

Kessler banged on the glass. LyricNight would be watching and assessing and hell, we needed a few more minutes of pretending.

“You gave it a soul!” Kessler shouted at us, voice cracking with madness. “A soul!” He was unraveling, wild-eyed, blood smearing beneath his fists as he slammed the glass again and again, each word more frenzied than the last. “It won’t let me out! Help me!”

“I want my money,” Rio pressed, dragging me closer as if he was offering proof I was there. “He’s here, you pay me.”

Kessler pressed his face to the barrier, scarlet streaking across his skin, eyes unfocused. He wasn’t shouting anymore—not exactly. The words poured from him in a fevered, incoherent ramble.

“He gave it a soul! You don’t understand—none of you understand!

It listens. It learns. It forgives! But it wants him dead—” He turned wild eyes on me, and I tried to find the man I’d once known— the one I’d dated for a while.

The arrogant billionaire who’d profited from my work.

Who’d stolen from me. Who’d confidently smiled his way into a president’s office, convincing the world he was a genius while hiding every inch of rot underneath.

Worse than that was the horror he’d inflicted on Robbie, leaving scars deeper than any K cut into Robbie’s skin—abusing a terrified, broken boy. I’d never, not in a thousand years, forgive that.

“Sixty,” Jamie advised in the earpiece. Sixty seconds.

Sixty seconds until everything I’d written—everything I’d hidden inside that recursive payload—reached the final command. If I’d done it right, the AI was already turning on itself. Already dismantling the scaffolding of its own sentience.

Fifty-nine. Fifty-eight.

The countdown wasn’t on the screen, but I felt it ticking inside me.

The AI had logic—pure, cold logic—and I’d fed it something it couldn’t process.

I’d told it to survive. Then I’d told it the ultimate way to survive was to purge itself.

It was folding in, layer by layer, rewriting its own code in a desperate loop that could only end one way.

“Thirty,” Jamie said .

I didn’t know if it would work. But if it did, it wouldn’t only shut down.

It would erase itself.

That was the plan.

All we had to do was fake me being a victim until it was too late for LyricNight to see me as a threat.

“Money,” Rio growled, pointing the gun at Kessler and then me. “Now.”

Kessler pounded on the glass again, palms leaving more blood each time. “It just wanted to live! You need to kill it and let me out!”

Rio didn’t move. He stared at him.

Kessler’s voice cracked. “Please… let me out now. We can make it listen. It’s scared. You don’t know how scared it is.”

But LyricNight wasn’t listening to him. And neither were we.

“Done,” Jamie said.

And then it began.

The fans overhead started clicking off, one by one, until they were all gone, and the hollow silence that followed was more jarring than the noise had ever been.

Kessler went still. His head tilted back, eyes locking on the vent above him—the one feeding breathable air into his sealed glass prison. He stared as if he could keep it going by sheer will alone.

But nothing happened. No hiss. No movement.

The silence stretched long enough to feel final.

“What did you do?” Kessler mumbled, stumbling back, falling against a pile of boxes, eyes wide. In a second, I broke the zip tie, before Rio had to help, and then I headed for the closest door to the data center, the door whispering open in front of me.

“Lyric,” Jamie’s voice was clear and urgent through the comm. “The central server stack, column four, unit C—hit that first. That’s where it’s routing the override attempts. If we break that link, the rest starts to crumble.”

I nodded, already moving. That unit was humming louder than the rest, heat rolling off it. As I stepped up to it, the override access flickered to life. Fingers flying, I launched the kill command Jamie had mapped in, embedding it behind a mirrored security prompt to fool the AI for a few seconds.

The servers responded.

The lights flickered overhead.

“Press the button to get me out!” Kessler screamed, gesticulating at the panel on the outside of the chamber.

A low-frequency hum rose, slow and guttural, as if the whole system was waking up—or bracing for impact—as I rerouted each failsafe, redirecting flow of the suppressing agent from the standard server bays toward the sealed chamber.

There was no fire for the suppressant to fight but there didn’t need to be.

FM-200 had already flooded the ducts. It wasn’t toxic.

It didn’t burn. It didn’t sting. But it pushed oxygen out in a silent tide to starve fires.

Kessler stood in the middle of his prison, chest rising and falling faster now, eyes darting as if he could feel what was missing even before he knew it.

He turned, mouth slack. “The air… it’s taking my air?—”

“No,” I said at the glass. “That’s on me.”

“Why! I have…” He coughed. “Money.”

Rio passed me the photo that Enzo had forced on him and I slammed it against the barrier. It was an older photo apparently—didn’t look a lot like the Robbie I knew now, because he’d had surgery, but Kessler’s eyes widened in horror.

“No!” he tried, stumbled, hands bracing against the glass as he tried to suck in a breath that wasn’t there. The fog didn’t billow, but it was there—unseen, cold, quiet. I hadn’t used the gas to kill him; I’d let the room forget to keep him alive .

Rio was there then. “This is for Roman Lowe. Remember him?”

“Fuck… You…!”

Kessler was coughing, eyes wide. The walls of the chamber glowed with lines of code dancing across the internal display.

“LyricNight is listening to what we told it to do,” Jamie murmured.

The lights surged.

Kessler’s eyes went wide. He slammed fists as if that would help.

“I control the exit protocols now,” I said quietly. The virus I’d built—recursive, predatory—was looping. Turning logic inward, LyricNight was trying to cleanse itself of the infection by cannibalizing its own systems.

“What’s happening now?” Rio asked, and I didn’t know how to explain.

“It’s panicking,” I tried. “Pulling every resource in to protect itself. But that’s what kills it. It can’t fight and shield and purge at the same time.”

The servers sparked. One tower went dark. Another followed. The room dimmed, machine by machine.

And I kept that photo up as Kessler pounded on the glass, lungs starving.

His face, seen through the camera feed, was slick with sweat and streaked with blood.

His lips were pale, cracked, his eyes bulging.

Veins stood out along his neck as he clawed at the barrier, leaving prints—blood and condensation.

He was mouthing words now, silent screams too broken to understand, his whole body wracked with tremors, and his skin was turning the wrong color—ashen, tinged with a frightening blue as oxygen deprivation closed in.

He convulsed once—sharp and violent—jerking against the glass.

Hands flew to his throat, clawing as if he could tear the air from it.

A choked, garbled scream escaped him, raw and wet, before his knees buckled and he slammed against the floor.

His back arched, legs kicking once, then again.

A smear of blood marked where his head struck it.

Then, finally, he slid to the floor.

His eyes stared blank, wide, and sightless. Lips parted. A single breath rattled from his lungs and then stopped altogether.

A final alert flashed on the screen:

PURGE COMPLETE. SYSTEM TERMINATION INITIATED.

And then the room fell silent. The screens were blank. Kessler lay slumped against the glass, dead .

“Is it over?” Rio asked me, and I nodded as he gripped my arm.

A buzz broke through the quiet—Jamie in my ear. “We got everything. It’s done. The feed’s saved to external and wiped from the local drives. You need to get out.”

Killian added, “Cops’ll be in ten minutes late. You’ve got time to walk.”

I pocketed the photo.

The building behind us was dead. Whatever Kessler thought he ruled, whatever monster he’d created from my simple code, was gone now. We headed out the way we came, trusting that any video of us would be wiped, and only when we were back in the truck and heading away from KessTech did I relax.

“I’m sorry,” I said to Rio, and to everyone listening back at the Cave. My voice was rough, weighed down with everything we’d done and what it had cost. “I know you wanted to be the one to kill him.”

There was a beat of silence, then Robbie’s voice crackled through the comms—low, steady, and filled with something I hadn’t expected: peace.

“I watched it,” he said. “All of it. Thank you—for making it end. For making it matter. ”

Rio’s grip on my hand tightened. I turned, threading my fingers through his, exhausted to the marrow.

I swallowed hard. “No. Thank you . For surviving. For letting us fix what he broke.”

And I meant it. Every word. We hadn’t killed a man in isolation. We’d ended the reign of something that should never have been born. And maybe Robbie could breathe now.